amble, I will ask you to look to-day, more carefully
than usual, at your well-known favorite, and to think about him with
some precision.

16. And first, Where does he come from? I stated that my lectures were
to be on English and Greek birds; but we are apt to fancy the robin all
our own. How exclusively, do you suppose, he really belongs to us? You
would think this was the first point to be settled in any book about
him. I have hunted all my books through, and can't tell you how much he
is our own, or how far he is a traveler.

And, indeed, are not all our ideas obscure about migration itself? You
are broadly told that a bird travels, and how wonderful it is that it
finds its way; but you are scarcely ever told, or led to think, what it
really travels for--whether for food, for warmth, or for seclusion--and
how the traveling is connected with its fixed home. Birds have not
their town and country houses,--their villas in Italy, and shooting
boxes in Scotland. The country in which they build their nests is their
proper home,--the country, that is to say, in which they pass the
spring and summer. Then they go south in the winter, for food and
warmth; but in what lines, and by what stages? The general definition
of a migrant in this hemisphere is a bird that goes north to build its
nest, and south for the winter; but, then, the one essential point to
know about it is the breadth and latitude of the zone it properly
inhabits,--that is to say, in which it builds its nest; next, its
habits of life, and extent and line of southing in the winter; and
finally, its manner of traveling.

17. Now, here is this entirely familiar bird, the robin. Quite the
first thing that strikes me about it, looking at it as a painter, is
the small effect it seems to have had on the minds of the southern
nations. I trace nothing of it definitely, either in the art or
literature of Greece or Italy. I find, even, no definite name for it;
you don't know if Lesbia's "passer" had a red breast, or a blue, or a
brown. And yet Mr. Gould says it is abundant in all parts of Europe, in
all the islands of the Mediterranean, and in Madeira and the Azores.
And then he says--(now notice the puzzle of this),--"In many parts of
the Continent it is a migrant, and, contrary to what obtains with us,
is there treated as a vagrant, for there is scarcely a country across
the water in which it is not shot down and eaten."

"In many parts of the Continent it is a migr